Casey Bennett

Casey Bennett (b. 1980, Grand Forks, British Columbia) is an urban landscape / contemporary fine art photographer currently based in south-central British Columbia, Canada. His clean photography of urban and semi-urban spaces is about exploration of places where architecture, landscape, portraits and the built environment intersect and a human presence can be felt around the corner. His work is also about transience, and ideas of change being brought in our surroundings and environment.

The project Hub City focuses on life in Williams Lake, British Columbia, an area of the province that has gone through significant cultural and socioeconomic transformations. Located in the Central Cariboo Interior, where individuals’ collective livelihoods and lifestyles have been, and are, currently heavily dependent upon certain industries–particularly the logging and mining industries. Generations of families have committed their lives and passed on an “identity” of working these jobs, becoming culturally bound to these careers. Bennett’s photographic project hopes to instill a visually compelling collection of images of this specific place in time and the prospect for insight into the community and its individuals who have shaped a region and created the character of a place. The environment is loaded with evidence from the past that is now layered with subtle manifestations about the inevitable future.

Aptly titled Hub City, this refers to Williams Lake as the central location that sits in the junction of Highway 97 and Highway 20, leading major routes to cities and points of interest like Kamloops (south), Bella Coola (west) and Prince George (north).

Huang Lucang

Huang Lucang was born in China in 1990. He earned his BA from Renmin University in Beijing and studied Architectural Design at Kyushu University in Japan. He also earned his MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Over the past seven years, Huang has lived in Beijing, Fukuoka, Tokyo, Shanghai and Boston as a research scholar and an artist. His works explores the idea of illusion in imagined landscapes and spaces through the use of camera and computer. The fundamental contradiction contained in his works provokes questions about the relationship of imagery to the physical world, and exploring the ineffable nature of reality. Huang's work is included in private collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States.

Lucang’s works focuses on the abstract shapes created by shadow, or computer graphics that appear in the form of imaginary landscapes. They are perceived by our common senses, but go beyond the perceptual territory by being titled and reformed. He aims to explore layers of the binary in this project: The light against shadow, a sense of place against a sense of nothingness, the outside against the inside, reality opposed to illusion.

Alex Knudsen

“There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.” - Carson McCullers

These photographs began during a period of transition as Knudsen moved from northeastern Massachusetts to New York City. The highway became his refuge as he traveled between his home and this new uncharted territory, often escaping one for the other. With this body of work he stitches a narrative of landscapes, people, and their markings to explore notions of isolation, rapture, and the longing for connection.

Alex Knudsen is a photographer working in Massachusetts. In 2014 he graduated with a BFA in photography from MassArt. His photographs and books have appeared in various exhibitions and publications in the US and Europe.

Meghan Braney

“here's my prayer:

that what happens to girls like me

who die dirty, give it up

with a shudder like pleasure—

pray that when we're killed as martyrs

we get loved like saints.”

-Daphne Gottlieb

The horror film genre is generally guilty of the objectification of women through the use of cinematic language which presents them as desirable clichés. The victim featured is often portrayed as promiscuous and then targeted by the aggressive male because of her sexuality. When the genre defies this rule, it is generally because women are portrayed in the opposite manner: as virgins free of sexuality. These two exhausted portrayals of the female character - virgin or whore - rely wholly on issues of sexuality to define the character’s development.

The repetitive use of these characters shapes how women are viewed in society today and this cultural memory affirms behavior. Through manipulation of archival photographs by scanning or collaging, Meghan Braney removes the image from what it was, similar to how repetition of the portrayals of women removes us from the reality. In doing so, her work calls attention to the connections between crimes against women in the horror realm and mistreatment of women in society. This body of work begs the question: are these films and media based on reality or does society mirror them?

Meghan Braney is a fine art photographer currently studying at Massachusetts College of Art and Design to earn her BFA in photography. She grew up in Northbridge, Massachusetts and currently resides in Boston.

Dru Hetrick

Dru Hetrick’s American Colors series – utilizes the artist’s interest in older film cameras to study how the physical elements of an American era she never experienced before is connected to the America we experience today. When Dru thinks of ‘Americana’, she think of bright blues, colorful neon, and fresh white picket fences in front of newly painted houses. But in the context of today, where architectural materials favor more minimalist metal, concrete and marble, these older colors take on new meaning much like the dreams of the people and country who made them.

The creation and breakdown of the American Dream over the course of the twentieth century and beyond is fascinating to Dru and she hopes to explore physical remnants of this theme through this series. Some images reveal a golden age long gone – relics of the bright commercial age of the ‘50s and ‘60s – while others gain a new identity within the context of a new time. Dru acknowledges she will never get to live within the era in which many of the subjects of her photos were made new, so what’s left for her to experience is their decay – their fading colors.

Dru Hetrick is an analog film photographer originally from NYC and currently based in Boston, MA. Hetrick delved into the medium through personal documentation, travel, university study at Emerson College, and music photography. Upon discovering her favorite film format – 6x6 120mm – she started projects that studied the color of the urban landscape around her, while also carrying cameras with her to serve as a diary of the subtler beauties of her daily life. Dru is continually adding to her American Colors and Snapshots series.

Shawn Rowe

Within Shawn Rowe’s work, a quiet repose emerges, where moments of introspection grow long while light and atmosphere become tactile. Landscape imagery punctuates this self-portrait, serving as metaphor to discuss the symbiosis between nature and the body. V characterizes this relationship as both internal and external, with each body leaving marks upon the other. The power structures that support this dialogue manifest as visual interruptions in the intervening space between reflection and perception. In this work, Shawn creates a space to discuss a range of definitions of masculinity, sexuality and gender in order to articulate acceptance and resolve.

The title V describes the ambiguity of the project itself. In ancient times, V was used interchangeably with the letter U. V is the Roman Numeral for five and embodies a downward pointing arrow. For this work, the two lines that create the letter V intersect where the body and the environment exchange forces. These images represent a visualization of this conversation. Like the letter V, Shawn asks the viewer to bring their own associations and meanings to the images and the body of work as a whole.

Amy Fink

In the face of great loss, how do we form meaning? Privately, we grapple with the event, we feel the sting and the irony of loss all at once. We always knew this was coming even though we didn’t know when. Publicly, we seek. Our minds become spiritual, there’s a vision in every parking lot, down every hallway. Every bird we hear is singing the song so and so used to whistle. Somewhere in these symbols we are meant to find solace. Yet the journey towards healing that we’ve embarked on feels more and more like a rat race, looping its wheel over and over until we exhaust ourselves back to normalcy.

In this ongoing project, Amy Fink works in contention with her family’s grief since the loss of her mother. This irreversible rupture changed everything, for all of them: how they see the world, how they consume their days, how they interact. While these motivations are not opaquely addressed in this body of work, these factors culminate and reveal themselves photographically to communicate broader themes of entropy, maternal care, nostalgic tendencies, and- in tandem, the folly involved in the impossible fight for control over it all.

Amy Fink is a fine arts photographer who received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2018. She was born and raised in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and currently lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently the Interim Director of Exhibitions at Aviary Gallery.